Hawaiʻi Nei Pae ʻĀina · Honolulu
Naiʻa Lewis
Naiʻa Ulumaimalu Lewis
Decoding our creative inheritance.
Artist, writer, and systems thinker. Founder of Studio Wā and Salted Logic, and maker of iMahina.
Decoding our creative inheritance.
Artist, writer, and systems thinker. Founder of Studio Wā and Salted Logic, and maker of iMahina.
An Indigenous women-owned creative studio in Honolulu: media, art, and design.
Visit Salted Logic ↗
A temporal studio for time and cultural frameworks, and home of my courses.
Visit Studio Wā ↗
Studio Wā's set of lunar tools. The app is coming to the App Store in November.
See iMahina ↗
Illustration, watercolor, and the Mosaic Mural Process.
See the art ↓
The Mosaic Mural Process is an art-based collaborative methodology I use with individuals and teams. A single image is divided among many people, drawn panel by panel, then assembled into one work. It builds connection and shared vision, and it leaves something lasting behind.
I also make individual pieces in digital art, watercolor, pencil, and ink. Braiding Sweetgrass and Nānā Pono were made for the Omidyar Foundation.
Commissions are by invitation through Salted Logic.
Braiding Sweetgrass · digital art · Nānā Pono · watercolor, pencil, ink
Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
I am Naiʻa — an artist, change-holder, teacher, and writer based in Honolulu with more than thirty years of practice across art, education, communications, facilitation, and guardianship of the natural world.
In the places I work, I often take the role of intergenerational mentor: in my own company, and at Big Ocean, where I'm helping the next leaders step up. I draw on decades of public and private sector experience and on walking my own spiritual path.
For twenty years my work also turned toward the ocean, including Big Ocean and the IUCN guidelines for large-scale marine managed areas. The full record is on LinkedIn.
Necessary Labor is a growing body of writing on culture, time, and the labor of making meaning. It crosses over with Studio Wā, where the same questions take an institutional shape. A podcast and a newsletter are in development, the beginning of a small ecosystem rather than another set of channels to feed.
Announcements only: launches, course dates, and new work. A few emails a year.
The living memos sit on a shared shelf called Expressions, on the studio site, alongside my own poems and word posts. The studio keeps the memos, I keep the poems, and one shelf holds both.
I come from a lineage of firstborn daughters four generations long.